Why Bikes and Bazookas Don’t Mix in Santa Barbara

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PSYCHO MANIA:  I am well acquainted with road rage. That’s why I want to buy a bazooka. By the way, they are legal to own in this country. This is America, after all. 

I tend to trigger easily. I was leafing through the L.A. Times this morning. That might be the problem. Dawn hadn’t woken up. But the crows had. As usual, they had a lot to say. A thick mist hung ripe and heavy. A shiny wet sheen shone off the street. ICE had just promulgated new rules, I read, limiting congressional access to Trump’s new penal colonies where those foolish enough to believe the American Dream are locked up. This is America, after all. 

Congressmembers can still inspect these gulags, I learned, but will be required, henceforth, to give ICE advance warning. Predictably, my head exploded. What if police had to serve search warrants this way?

My dog was bored. He’d heard it all before. Get on the bike, he said. 

There’s something magical about having the city to yourself. People just waking up. Bathroom lights blinking on, the splash of showers. Like fireflies and rain. No cars yet. Quietude. Solitude. You can luxuriate. It’s like a street spa. A few early birds walk across the Micheltorena Street bridge — women mostly, eyes bruised with exhaustion — on their way to work. Below and beneath, the jacaranda is exploding. Purple carpet, purple canopy. Just being there — rolling through — it’s like being let in on some secret, one that can’t be put in words.

This is Santa Barbara, after all. 

Heading down State Street, you surprise a downtown without its makeup on. People in their sleeping bags under every awning. Many with no sleeping bags. How do they do it? We should study such secrets. Guys with black rubber boots and high-pressure nozzles hosing down the streets. Guys unloading refrigerated trucks so big the engines stay running. Baristas opening the coffee shops. The Lululemon crowd, too, all lithe and limber, rolled-up yoga mats strapped to their backs, like Civil War armies on the march.

In a very expensive city, it’s a reliable cheap thrill. Forty years later, I’m still enthralled. It’s like winning the lottery. Every time. If I were driving, I’d miss out. I’d have the radio on. I would miss the sound of mist falling.

It’s May, which means it’s CycleMAYnia month. That’s when our civic leaders are expected to go all ceremonially hoo-hah over the practical joys of riding one’s bike.

I’m glad they are. But, like, duh!

Remember what my dog said?

“Get on the bike.”

It ain’t like eating your spinach.

This past week, they just opened the brand-new mondo-deluxe Modoc Road bike lane, a $6.5 million missing link in what some bike advocates describe as a sprawling necklace of bike paths that allow cyclists to get from A to Z in Santa Barbara in the safe security of being separated from traffic. I missed out on the hoo-hah grand opening this Saturday, but I took the new path out for a spin Sunday morning on my way out to Anna’s Bakery in Goleta. I’d been present when the sperm and the egg of this bike path first collided, and I’d covered many of the ensuing fights in front of the county supervisors over how many trees would have to be killed.

We love Santa Barbara so much, we fight over everything.

Like Fox Mulder of X-Files fame, I want to believe. But like the apostle Thomas, I am plagued by doubts. As bike lanes go, it was better than nice. In fact, it was pretty damn cool. But now that it had finally been built, would “they” really come?

I wondered.

You know how “they are.” Pretty damn fickle.

And was the previous couplet of Modoc Road bike lanes — those traditional old-school white stripes painted on the side of the road — really that unsafe? Would the juice here be worth the squeeze, I asked myself. 

After all, I’d been riding that stretch of road for an eternity and a half now on my way to the bike path that connects the tail end of Modoc Road all the way to UCSB. In all those rides, I’d never felt the least bit crowded or intimidated by the cars whizzing by. For the record, that UCSB bike path — the crowning creation of 1970s bike counter-culture, all sweaty with pant legs rolled up — remains one of the unsung masterpieces of political, public works, and public finance engineering by the now-deceased Darth Vader of environmental politics. 

My skepticism had been fueled by the less-than-desultory turn of new bike riders along the recently built Las Positas Road bike path between Modoc and Cliff Drive. For the record, that pathway is nicer than nice; no bells and whistles were spared in its design. And they’re a few dips and detours along the way that qualify as nothing less than sublime. Even so, for the most part, I prefer the old white striped bike lane on Las Positas itself. No doubt perversity propels me, but practicality does too. From the striped lane on the street, I have a much better vantage point on any oncoming traffic approaching from the side streets. I have tasted the concrete enough already. I am too old to get T-boned now. I need to see what’s coming. 

So, yes, we built it. But did they come? I’m still waiting. Maybe now that they just filled in the missing link on Modoc, the bipedal multitudes will spill forth and multiply. I would love to be proven wrong.

If you ask bike transit experts such as UCSB geographer Trisalyn Nelson and Dr. Daniel Fishbein, a congenial curmudgeon and former epidemiologist with the Center for Disease Control living here in town, I already have been, but am just too thickheaded to realize it. All the evidence, they both agree — and I suspect they rarely do — unequivocally and definitively demonstrates that cyclists as a species follow bike paths the way the Crusaders of the Middle Ages believed that Trade followed the Cross. If you want people to get out of their cars and ride bikes, build bike paths away from traffic. It might as well be a law of physics. All the American cities demonstrating a surge in bike ridership experienced a surge in bike path construction. 

Uncle! I give. But also, I’m also still waiting.

I looked up the Netherlands, reportedly the most bike-friendly country on the planet. Here’s what I found. In the Netherlands, every man, woman, and child owns 1.3 bikes. In the United States, it’s .3 bikes, .9 cars, and 1.3 guns. Per person. In the Netherlands, people satisfy fully 25 percent of their travel needs atop a bike. That’s roughly 1.5 miles a day or 547 miles a year. In the United States, the hardcore riders — the ones my wife dubbed “mosquito boys” — will log in 3,000 miles year, but on average, we’ll hop on a bike maybe 15 days a year. In the Netherlands, maybe 16 percent of the population can be classified as obese. In the United States, depending on the metric, it ranges from 43 to 70 percent. On average, people in the Netherlands live a couple of years longer than we do here. But of course, we have guns and ammo. Every year, in fact, we buy 15 billion rounds of ammo. And every year, 44,000 Americans die from gunshot wounds. It should be noted that 60 percent of these are self-inflicted. In the Netherlands, they have 3.9 guns for every 100 citizens. Maybe 40-50 die of gunshot wounds there. By contrast, 281 Netherlanders die in bike accidents. Of those, 118 are males older than 70. 

And, oh yeah, they have 35,000 miles of bike paths over there.

Conspicuously lacking from my AI search was how many bazookas are privately owned in either the United States or in the Netherlands. I think I can guess. 

Here’s my parting shot. Do yourselves a favor. Get on a bike. Don’t do it because it’s good for you. Don’t do it because it’s good for the planet. Don’t do it because it’s way cheaper than paying for gas. Do it because it’s fun.